4 ms·
It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear tha
by gdubs 6y ago
It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear that a sector like chemical production is heavily weighted towards producing fertilizer. And the majority of that is being used to grow animal feed. Or the transportation sector, a lot of which is shipping food all over the world. And land-use change, deforestation, etc, to create grazing land or grow conventional mono crops — again, mostly for animal feed.
Basically, in our current system, plant foods are an edge product of an animal agriculture system. To be more sustainable, we probably want the opposite — meat as an edge product of a plant-focused agriculture.
The picture in my head is a more decentralized system — regional farms, urban farms, etc. And probably a carbon tax which would make meat a little pricier. It doesn’t have to disappear, but the externalities should be baked into the cost.